By Srinath Srinivasan
Product discovery is a major problem for retailers who list their products online. A major chunk of their budget is allocated to make this happen in the most efficient manner. Whereas, for computer vision companies this is a use case that can be greatly monetised. Charmboard, a Bengaluru-based startup, is on its own route to make this happen. Its route at the moment is different from many other tech juggernauts. It has positioned itself in the middle of retailers (who own product catalogues) and media brands (as a partner with premium video streaming brands and social platforms where there is no scarcity of videos and user generated content (UGC)).
“When a user touches a product in a video, a charm comes up. It shows the product available in a retailer’s catalogue and makes it shoppable. Then we provide a call to action—whether to find the product online or in stores,” explains GBS Bindra, founder and CEO of Charmboard. The startup charges the brands based on the number of discoveries made. Bindra claims that he is able to provide a clickthrough rate of 5 % while the industry standard is at only 1%.
At the core of its business is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). This enables all the users to make organic discoveries that are native to the content they are viewing. At the moment, the company is focused on premium videos, which are shot in high definition, making it easy for its system to learn more. While the system ingests this video content, the company gets an ocean of products from numerous product catalogues of various retailers and feeds them into the system. With this data, the system can make a match when one of the products comes up on any of the videos.
When a viewer desires to get a product that appears on the screen, he/she simply touches it. The viewer can then shop the product right from that point. Right now, the products that fall under apparel, footwear, jewellery, lingerie, care and beauty can be shopped. The company plans to add food and travel to this list. To make all of this happen, it has partnered with a number of media and retail brands like Jabong, Myntra, Jockey, Yashraj Films, Gocoop and more.
Charmboard has raised $5 million in Series A funding from Target Corporation and 3one4 capital. Since its launch two years back, it has enabled over 1 billion discoveries and has ingested over 300,000 hours of videos from multiple media brands and UGC from over 15 million active users. It aims to create boards for users, who can add videos to the boards and share it with a community of users. “We are focused on everything that is video. We are not after images. Videos are the future of internet!” exclaims Bindra.